Change iRate User Database From XML to SQL?

[Michael Crawford]

The iRate user database is presently three hundred megabytes of XML
files. If a lot of users hit the server all at the same time, just
opening and parsing all those files will put an unreasonably heavy
load on our server, which is just a Xen VM on a shared host.

The server would be a lot faster and use less memory if we used a
proper database to store the user info. If you don't want to use SQL,
there are Open Source XML databases, that store the data in binary
form but present an API that's just like reading XML files. I don't
know what is available as Open Source, but there are also
Object-Oriented databases that may make more sense than SQL.

If you want to use SQL, I have it on good authority that one is better
off using PostgreSQL than MySQL. The guy who told me that is a really
high-end sysadmin and Perl web application programmer.

Mike